Friday, May 12, 2017

A Direct Hit: A Review of James Patterson's Bullseye

More laced
with intrigue than blood and gore is the new Michael Bennett thriller from
James Patterson, Bullseye. Bennett,
blue-collar police detective, gets involved in the hunt for the world’s best
assassin, who is somehow tied in with several brilliantly-executed murders, and
apparently determined to assassinate the president of the United States.

Bullseye (Little, Brown & Company, 2016, 368 pages,
$28.00 hardback) is the ninth in a series of novels featuring NYPD detective Michael
Bennett. Patterson is the extremely successful author of over one hundred
books, often written with co-authors, as is this one, with Michael Ledwidge.

The new
president has come to New York to support his case at the United Nations
against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s plan to start a new cold war.
Tension rises for Bennett, assigned to protect the president along with a
contingent of New York cops. Meanwhile, a couple of stone-cold killers have
baffled the police by killing a professor who moonlights as a drug
manufacturer, along with his whole crew, leaving a mass of drugs and money at
the scene untouched. The Russian mob has been targeted as potential middle-men
for a hit on the president. And Bennett is mixed up in the whole shebang.

Patterson
and Ledwidge craft a thriller that keeps the reader suspended until the final
pages. As unlikely as it may seem that the bad guys will win, we still believe
it is possible. The assassin seems untouchable and almost omnipotent. The
descriptive style is laced with brand names, many familiar and some exotic,
which gives a flare to the high-financed killers in the story. But it is the
unrelenting back-and-forth game of detective versus criminal that makes this
book unputdownable. As the last line of one chapter passes before the reader’s
eyes, the hunger for the next one escalates. Suspense lovers will not be
disappointed with Bullseye.